A candidate for Congress in Virginia’s 8th Congressional District has a unique perspective on the catastrophe unfolding before our eyes in Ukraine: firsthand exposure to the country’s history and the Soviet mentality that governed it at the time from living there.
Karina Lipsman was born in Ukraine and spent her first eight years on this mortal coil we call earth there.
Now, as a Republican hoping to unseat incumbent Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) she has message for President Biden which she shared with Fox News:
“[I]n terms of what happened, the crisis did not develop overnight. We had intelligence for months that we could have acted on that said Russia was going to invade, and we had all these possible scenarios that we could have played out – the least likely of which was that full invasion by Russia into Ukraine … which is exactly what we’re experiencing right now,” Lipsman told Fox News Digital.
Lipsman, who worked for a decade in the defense industry and held some of the highest security clearances within the intelligence community and the Department of Defense, added that despite the administration’s access to “the time, the intelligence, the capabilities and even the Ukrainian government pleading for help,” the White House “did not do much to prevent that least likely scenario from happening.”
Lipsman grew up in Ukraine, then the Soviet Union, until she was 8 years old. She has fond memories of Odesa, the port city along the Black Sea where she grew up, known for its 19th-century architecture and views of the ocean.
But she does remember the day before she left the Soviet Union, which was on the brink of collapse at the time, when she went to a partially emptied market with her grandmother in the morning to buy half a loaf of bread and bring it home. Later that day, she and her grandmother returned to the market for another half loaf, and the price had tripled within a matter of hours.
Continue reading about Lipsman’s journey here.